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Fresh Air Fund: 25,000 children benefit from readers’ generosity as target reached

“I'm always staggered by the generosity of Star readers and the people who use this charity as a way of reaching out and making their community better,” says Toronto Star publisher John Cruickshank.

What do these girls talk about at Camp Camp Couchiching? "Everything!" From left to right: Ruby Forsyth, Samara Tower, Carmen Scorsone and Irene Gonzalez practise their cabin dance at Camp Couchiching where they have come up with their own words to describe the fun. (Leslie Ferenc / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Well, you did it. As you have for more than a century, during good times and bad. So, on behalf of the 25,000 children whose summer you made through the Toronto Star Fresh Air Fund, thank you.

Thank you for the gifts of discovery, of wonder, of awe.

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Thanks for the gifts of fireflies and swooping bats, of j-strokes and mastered knots, of kayaks and canoes, of rock-climbing and craft-making — even getting to know new bugs and the ickiness of dock spiders.

Thanks for the gifts of friendship and the secrets, or sorrows, shared along pine-needled paths, for the delight of campfire cooking and the nirvana of the perfectly roasted marshmallow, for the mentorship of counsellors who know just about everything, and the underrated pleasures of silliness and just goofing around.

Thank you for sending — by topping the Fresh Air Fund’s target of $650,000 — what amounts to a love letter to Toronto, and a summertime lifeline to children who may need it most, providing respite from the city’s heat, its unyielding straight lines and often straitened circumstances.

“I’m always staggered by the generosity of Star readers and the people who use this charity as a way of reaching out and making their community better,” said Star publisher John Cruickshank, who recalled the rewards of his own boyhood escapes from the city.

“For me, it was going up to Boy Scout camp. It was a huge event,” he said. “The whole summer was organized around the week, of getting out and sleeping in tents and being out there in the full light of the sun in the day and the full light of the stars at night.”

Since 1901, when a heat wave killed 24 people (half of them children), when legendary Star publisher Joseph Atkinson saw in poor Toronto streets the suffering of those living in sweltering neighbourhoods without plumbing, sanitation or means of relief, this newspaper’s Fresh Air Fund has enabled underprivileged and special-needs children to attend a day or residential camp.

The fund offers an escape from what might be “harsh realities,” said Barbara Mrozek, the Star’s director of charities and philanthropy. “And an opportunity for kids just to be kids.”

More than half of Fresh Air Fund donations still come by cheques sent through the mail, Mrozek said, and more than half from individuals, young and old, who empty their piggy banks or open their wallets as well as their hearts.

All summer, the Star’s Leslie Ferenc has travelled central Ontario’s holiday country to report from some of the 103 camps that support the fund.

Perhaps no dispatch caught the spirit of things better than her report from Camp Couchiching at Longford Mills, where campers invented a cabin dance required to gain entry, devised their own private vocabulary — “pieoratize,” naturally, meaning to save room for dessert.

What may have been the best paragraph this newspaper published all summer said this:

“When asked what the girls talked about before lights out, Carmen Scorsone and Ruby Forsyth, both 12, replied in unison: “Everything!” Then they all started laughing.”

Over and over, from her travels, Ferenc reported hearing laughter — of campers sharing the uninhibited laughter of the carefree, the gratifying sounds of young bodies at play, minds engaged, spirits touched.

As an old camp ditty goes: “We laughed until our cheeks were tight; We laughed until our stomachs were sore; If only we could stop we might; Remember what we’re laughing for.”

At the Star, the Fresh Air Fund “is so fundamental to who we are and how we regard our mission in the city,” Cruickshank said. “It’s as fundamental as the news coverage we give and it’s motivated from the same place. It’s that sense of mission.”

Besides, “it’s one of those paradoxes,” he noted, “that we only really get civilized by being close to nature.”

From a private listening point or watching place, a camper might consider the world’s immensity or the tiny nuances of nature — the mysterious night noises, the musical sound of rain, the birdsong and leaf-flutter, the teeming metropolis of the shallows, or, as the great nature essayist Edward Hoagland once put it, “the courage of a turtle.”

For city kids to venture out of the familiar, to walk along the water or into the woods beyond, usually rewards the willing spirit and attentive ears and eyes.

In the landscape, it shows what the ice did and what water can do; in the rocks, it records the history of the planet; in the woods, in the plant and animal world, it reveals decay, renewal and the circle of life.

In the natural world, campers learn to name things, and by doing so to claim something forever for their own mind’s eye — to see not just trees, but jack-pines and white birches; to see not just birds, but loons and whiskey-jacks; to see not just the dazzle of stars, but constellations and the eternal order of the night skies.

To gaze upon the world with wonder, be it dawn or in the cool of the evening, is “one of the oldest satisfactions of man,” wrote author and conservationist Sigurd F. Olson.

It is to realize, he said, that “nothing stands alone and everything, no matter how small, is part of a greater whole.”

The building of a “greater whole” in Toronto was, and remains, the motivating spirit behind the Star’s Fresh Air Fund.

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